Cash-strapped NJ Transit once again is in budget spotlight

A day after New Jersey Transit’s board authorized fare hikes for the first time in nearly a decade, the cash-strapped bus and rail agency’s financial woes were a key topic for lawmakers leading an ongoing review of Gov. Phil Murphy’s latest state spending plan.

Perhaps most controversial in his nearly $56 billion proposed budget, Murphy is asking lawmakers to go along with a call to hike taxes on the state’s highest-earning corporations and earmark the new revenue to help support NJ Transit’s shaky annual spending.

Doing so, Murphy has argued, would help put the statewide mass-transit agency on more solid fiscal footing as it continues to face rising costs, even as ridership has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels.